Screenings have just kicked off in Manhattan for the Tribeca Film Festival, but as always not all the films are showing in theaters–and there’s more available online this year than ever before. Here’s a quick guide to what you can see and how to see it. Streaming select titles: Four feature films and four shorts will be online after their initial theatrical screenings this week and next; they’ll also be eligible for an audience choice award with prize money totaling $15,000. All of Tribeca’s online material discussed below, including these eight films, is available at http://tribecafilm.com/online. The short films include: * Love in […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 19, 2014Yesterday the PBS documentary series POV and The New York Times announced a collaborative effort to simultaneously show documentary films on the organizations’ individual websites. Later today the first film, Dan Barry and Kassie Bracken’s half-hour The Men of Atalissa, which was produced by the Times, kicks off the effort, with a full series of films following throughout the year. Along with the film, which is about a group of mentally disabled men who endured decades of abuse in the bunkhouse they lived in in Atalissa, Iowa, the Times will run an article about the men by Barry and the POV […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 8, 2014George Orwell claimed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that English was in a bad way: common consensus (which he was satirizing) held “that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.” His own opinion was more that “the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Thus it could be resisted: “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 12, 2013Jake Price may primarily be known as a photojournalist, working for outlets like the BBC and the New York Times. But with his latest project, Unknown Spring, he’s strengthening a new identity as an immersive, interactive documentary filmmaker. As his thoughts below illustrate, however, he sees photojournalism, traditional film, and online interactive media all as an extension of nonfiction storytelling–different tools to explore In March 2011 he journeyed to the Tohoku region of Japan to document the devastation left in the wake of the Pacific tsunami. That project eventually became an html5 website featuring photographs, audio recordings, full-motion video, and […]
by Randy Astle on Aug 22, 2013What is a movie or a TV program? Is it the creative message, the story, or the medium of distribution, whether movie theater of living room TV set? Is a movie the once-upon-a-time full-motion b&w and color images of The Wizard of Oz or the grand panorama of Lawrence of Arabia – or is it the stories they tell? Is a TV show the grainy images distributed through a broadcast or cable system and displayed on a tiny living-room set shows – or is Edward R. Murrow, I Love Lucy or Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show? When is a movie […]
by David Rosen on Aug 9, 2013Dadaab lies in eastern Kenya, not far from the Somali border. The area hosts the largest complex of refugee camps in the world, with over 474,000 people, primarily Somalis, living in the combined Dadaab and Alinjugur camps, making it larger than Atlanta, Miami, Oakland, or New Orleans. The sheer size of the camp makes life difficult, causing most residents to stay there long-term as well; the camp has just turned 20, and many children have never lived anywhere else. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, events in Somalia since 2011 have forced many more people across the […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 25, 2013A coalition of broadcasters including WNET, FOX, WPIX and Univision filed a preemptive injunction in Manhattan’s federal district court earlier this month to halt the launch of Aereo, a $12-a-month online subscription service scheduled to go live on March 14th. Aereo proposes to use an array of tiny TV antennas to capture over-the-air broadcast channels and then retransmit these signals via online streaming to web-enabled devices, be it a computer, smartphone or tablet. The broadcasters argue that Aereo’s action will violate their protections under the Copyright Act. “Aereo has not licensed this television programming from those who own it. Nor […]
by David Rosen on Mar 6, 2012Screenwriter and director Brent Hoff, who we selected for this year’s 25 New Faces list, has a short out today that’s perfectly timed for Valentines Day. Called The Love Competition, it’s included as part of the next issue of Wholphin, will play at SXSW, but is now online courtesy of Wired and Wholphin. The Love Competition looks at the neurochemistry of romance, pitting a group of contestants against each other as their brains are scanned while they are thinking of their lovers, their ex-lovers, or perhaps just the concept of love itself. Hoff, who won a Tribeca Sloan Prize for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 14, 2012Most of the time when I come across interesting articles or video on the web I clip them to my Evernote reader and check them out later on my Blackberry or iPad. Here, then, are a few things I’ve clipped that might interest you too. From CNN Money: “One in eight to cut cable and satellite TV in 2010.” What are the implications for online content creators? In Spring 2008 I wrote about Alix Lambert’s Crime book for Filmmaker. (The piece is not online, but you can check it out on her site.) Here, at The Graveyard Shift, she discusses […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 2, 2010